Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Nation
Editor-in-Chief Femi
Kusa’s thoughtless and unkind tribute to the late Guardian publisher Alex Ibru outraged my
sensibilities in more ways than one. It’s a poorly written, unbearably
narcissistic, petty, vindictive, and cowardly piece. Kusa was clearly not in
the right frame of mind when he wrote it. This is evident from the essay's
crying lack of internal coherence, its embarrassing structural deformities, its
avoidably ugly grammatical errors, and its general vacuity.

How could someone who is inviting us to see him as the reason—or at least one
of the reasons— for the distinctive style and editorial success of the Guardian not know enough to know that
there is no such word as "confusionist" in the English language
(except as an alternative spelling of Confucianist, i.e., a follower of
Confucius), or that the expression "he called off" should have been
"he hung up," or that "inseperable" is properly spelled
"inseparable," or that "sleepless" is not spelled
"sleepness," etc.? (Has this man's computer's spellcheck been disabled?)
I have noted several other mortifying solecisms that I don't expect from my
undergraduate students. And he is supposed to be one of Nigeria's journalistic
"icons"!

But let's even ignore his inexcusable grammatical incompetence for now,
although he earns a living correcting other people’s grammar. Kusa comes across
as a coarse, mean-spirited, juvenile, and egocentric swellhead who is
inebriated with an exaggerated sense of his importance and who has a fragile
ego that needs constant rejuvenation through scorn-worthy self-congratulation.

Somebody died, his family and loved ones are still
in a state of emotional turmoil, and all that this narcissist can do is to
exploit this tragic situation to construct an image of himself as the
apotheosis of moral uprightness, as Nigerian journalism's nonpareil
personification of morality, and as the patron-saint of "principles"
who is unblemished by the faintest sprinkle of ethical dirt. And he does all
this at the expense of a dead person, nay dead people (because he also savagely
maligned the late Andy Apkorugo), who can't defend themselves.

Let me be clear: I am NOT defending the late Ibru. I don't know enough about
him or how he ran the Guardian to
refute or confirm what Kusa wrote about him. But having recently
lost a wife and having taught obituary writing and
journalism ethics for years, I DO know that it's distasteful and insensitive to
the survivors of the dead to so carelessly traduce their departed kin just days
after his passing. Of course, clearly evil people who brought death and misery
to large swaths of people are exempt from this consideration.Ibru,
with all his foibles, hardly fits that description.

The late Alex Ibru

I also do not want to trammel Kusa's right to free
expression. My whole point is that his piece is intolerably indecent and
beneath the dignity of a person of his accomplishments for at least three
reasons.

First, the occasion of a person's death is hardly a
fitting and proper moment to draw unflattering character sketches of the person
as a cold, ruthless, "unfeeling," "scheming," [Kusa's
words] vainglorious, and soulless hedonist. This is not necessarily because of
the person (after all the dead can't be injured in a material sense, a reason
the courts have ruled that a dead person can't be libeled) but because the
survivors of the departed who are at the early stages of the grieving process
deserve some consideration. Showing sensitivity to the sensibilities of
survivors of the dead, at least in the first few days or weeks of a death, is a
basic virtue in journalistic writing.

We like to say in Nigeria that it's
"un-African" to speak ill of the dead. But there is nothing uniquely
African about that precept; it's a universal human precept. As I once
wrote here, it's one of the supreme ironies of our humanity
that it is tragedies and traumas, more than successes and prosperity, that
usually bring out the depth of the humanity in us. Perhaps it is because these
tragedies remind us all of our own frailty, our own vulnerability, and our own
mortality. Well, Kusa has bucked this enduring human predisposition to radiate
warmth and tenderness, however transitory, in other people's moments of
distress.

Second, why did Kusa wait till Ibru's death to write
what he wrote about him? I have no facts to impeach the credibility of his
character portrait of Ibru, but there is something eerily sinister about the
choice of occasion to do this. It shows neither valor nor "principles,"
which Kusa is persuading us to believe he is an embodiment of.

Third, there is nothing that is, in fact,
particularly revealing or informative in Kusa's piece. It is more about Kusa
than it is about Ibru's death and life. He merely highlighted the weaknesses of
Ibru's life to validate himself. The summary of the piece is basically this:

I was told Ibru died. Too bad. But he actually
doesn't deserve to be mourned. He deserved his fate. He was a devious, avaricious,
nepotistic, niggardly, and cold-blooded capitalist pig who was, in addition,
given to sybaritic lavishness and opportunism. I—and others—actually made the Guardian for which he became famous.
[Never mind that Kusa has not been able to replicate his “genius” in the
defunct Comet and in the Nation]. He wanted to use me to further
his baleful boardroom politics, but being the principled, upright, and unblemished
person that I am, I resisted—to his astonishment. I finally left his company
because I couldn't stand his staggeringly pestiferous intrigues any longer. I
have never looked back. Look, this dead man had no redeeming qualities. Well, I
hope his wife somehow finds comfort and learns from her husband’s terrible life
and failings.

This may seem like a grotesque caricature of what
Kusa wrote, but go read the piece both on the lines AND between the lines. It’s
a viciously violent animadversion against a dead person that could wait—that
is, if it must be written.

My concern, as it should be obvious by now, isn't
about the essay's facticity. It's about its inopportune timing, its rank
insensitivity, its downright cowardice, its smug, perverse self-flattery during
other people’s moment of personal tragedy. I don't know what kind of journalism
Kusa practiced and still practices. But he certainly hasn’t given a good
account of his journalistic judgment. That’s such a crying shame!

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.